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Albania
Manufacturing
Chemicals
Albania's chemical industry was geared mainly toward producing
agrochemicals and chemicals for minerals processing. During the
effort to achieve economic self-reliance in the 1970s and 1980s,
Albania's government frantically tried to increase fertilizer
output at plants in Krujė and Fier, which produced nitrogen and
phosphate from imported rock phosphate. Nitrogen and phosphate
fertilizer production totaled about 350 billion tons between 1985
and 1990. A lack of spare parts and raw materials, especially
natural gas, halted production in mid-1991. Western economists
estimated that the US$3 million needed for the main phosphate
plants' rehabilitation might be too high a price to pay because
domestic deposits of key raw materials were projected to last
only three to five years at normal production rates. One of Albania's
two ammonia-urea plants planned to restart operations in 1992,
but it desperately needed spare parts and environmental protection
equipment. The country's lone pesticide plant, which did not stop
producing DDT until 1982, made lindane as well as products based
on sulfur, zinc, copper, and mercury. In 1991 the facility was
working at less than 10 percent of capacity, and production was
not likely to be stepped up because the plant was in poor condition
and environmentally unsafe. Other chemical enterprises included
a plastics-fabrication facility at Lushnjė, a rubber and plastics
works at Durrės, and a paint and pigment factory in Tiranė.
Data as of April 1992
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